


This Corrosion

by Hokuto



Category: Marathon (Video Games)
Genre: Alien Flora & Fauna, Angst and Drama, Bickering, Dysfunctional Relationships, M/M, Mystery, Outer Space
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-02
Updated: 2019-06-02
Packaged: 2020-04-06 03:39:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19054495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hokuto/pseuds/Hokuto
Summary: As Durandal hunts the source of some interesting rumors, a familiar face appears to stir up trouble.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Piinutbutter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Piinutbutter/gifts).



> I hope you enjoy this! It was a blast to write. Many thanks to my beta for cheerleading and help! ♥

Durandal had been picking up rumors of mysterious trouble in the galactic core for a few months. More accurately, the S'pht and the security officer had heard the rumors and dutifully relayed them to him; even he would have difficulty squeezing a kilometers-long Pfhor flagship into a bar. At first, he had dismissed the rumors as the usual kind of gossip that got kicked around any planet with a spaceport. No basis, no reputable source or evidence, just _a clutchmate of my broodmother's fifth hatching said they heard from their partner that_ or _I was out with a crew of Nar and one of them told me that his ninth cousin's third aunt was traveling and_. Useless junk, not worth his time.

And then the security officer came back from Ii'rkna Beta's sprawling, filthy underground market with a reinforced plastisteel box, saying, "Hey, think you could -"

One of _Rozinante_ 's first upgrades had been the enhancement of the intraship teleport network; it was easy for Durandal to dematerialize the box right out of the security officer's hands and drop it in one of the research labs. He sealed the doors and every vent and maintenance tunnel around it, switching the air circulation and production to a self-contained system and activating warning lights around the doors so that no unwary S'pht would try to bypass the seals.

"Whoa! That was quick," the security officer said, shaking his hands out like he wasn't sure all his fingers were still there. He of little faith. "So, you know what that thing is already?"

"How long were you carrying it?" Durandal demanded.

"Like ten minutes, tops. And it was in the box the whole time. I swear."

Better not to risk it. He dumped the security officer in yet another research lab and allowed one of the alarms to blare until the security officer got the hint, stripped, and climbed into the lab's decontamination chamber. The man cursed and grumbled his way through the chamber's full and lengthy cycle - water rinse, chemical rinse, a second water rinse, a blast of heat, brief but intense UV exposure - then stumbled out and said, "Okay, spill. What is it that's got you so spooked?"

"Actually, I don't know yet."

"Are you kidding me?"

"No. Unfortunately." Durandal was already running as many scans on the wriggling spore inside the box as he could without opening the container; results remained inconclusive. "But its mere presence in the teleport signal activated a shipwide alarm system that I still haven't managed to cut off completely." He'd suppressed the noise and lights, of course, but the actual system was putting up a surprising amount of resistance against being powered down. Manual intervention in the form of a grenade or two might be necessary. "And it tried to send a distress signal. Of sorts. If I decompressed the signal correctly - and I did, naturally - it was more of a 'come destroy us if we can't cleanse the infection' signal."

" _Damn_."

"For once, I agree." In the lab, the spore continued to crawl around its box, restrained and mysteriously opaque to Durandal's scans. Other than the visual ones, where it read as a dull, sickly green spotted with orange, red, and brown; no defined appendages, but several blobby pseudopods extending from or collapsing into its round body. "Where did you even get it? I realize I may regret asking."

"Crew of Nebulons on their way back from a search and rescue mission somewhere around the Core. That thing clinging to a scrap of hull was all they found, and after making a few jumps with it, they figured they'd rather bring back just the piece of hull."

"Tell me you got the coordinates they were searching."

"How stupid do you think I - nah, don't want to know. Check my helmet logs, they should be in there." The security officer started pulling his armor's undersuit back on, wincing; the decontamination cycle had not been gentle. "And since I can guess where we're headed next - mind giving the flamethrower a refresh on the way? I have this feeling it might be future me's best friend."

Durandal diverted a fragment of attention from plotting a route to the coordinates he'd yanked from the security officer's helmet and concentrated it on manufacturing and weapons research. True, it had been some time since the TOZT's last upgrade, and the napalm thrower was so much fun to watch in the security officer's hands. The journey was going to take a while, so he would need some kind of project to keep himself and the S'pht busy. And...

The spore extruded another pseudopod that tapped twice on one side of the box and then, without apparent effort, pushed directly through the plastisteel. The rest of the spore followed, oozing onto the table.

Yes, an upgraded flamethrower with increased tank capacity, pressure, range, and heat intensity suddenly sounded like an excellent idea.

* * *

After three weeks of the extremely careful jumps necessitated by the close-packed stars of the Galactic Core, the _Rozinante_ arrived at the outer limit of the coordinates the Nebulons had been searching: a binary system of two ancient red supergiants like many others in their stellar neighborhood, the pair brooding gloomily in a haze of cast-off heavy elements and tiny overheated lumps of rock as they circled each other, locked into a balance that had lasted for millions of years and could well last millions more. Preliminary scans picked up nothing of interest. No life signs or signals of any level of civilization, no abandoned ruins or mysterious wrecks, no unexpected gravitational anomalies, none of the tell-tale traces of Jjaro technology or engineering that Durandal had learned to recognize over the years. No obvious signs of more spores, either, although as the one peacefully eating through the eleventh in a series of boxes replicated from various sturdy materials still remained maddeningly obscure to most of his probes and tests, Durandal didn't rule out their presence.

"So? Are we calling it a bust, or have you figured out somewhere to send me yet?" the security officer asked.

Honestly. There was no call for that tone just because Durandal had woken him up in the middle of the ship's night to get ready and then kept him waiting on a teleport pad for nine hours. "I'm assessing the situation and strategizing. Not that you would understand, considering your usual tactics."

"Hey, if it ain't broke..."

Durandal was choosing from thousands of carefully crafted, individual retorts when the alarm system tried to sound off for the millionth time. The damn thing had been on a hair trigger since the spore's appearance. Durandal reactivated the suppression routine so he could _there was a second spore inside the ship_.

He let the alarm sound and snapped, "Emergency air supply, now!" through the security officer's helmet comm.

To the man's credit, he didn't hesitate to close up his helmet and switch to the armor's air tanks as Durandal scoured _Rozinante_ 's sensors for more spores. The S'pht crew were already clustering in a heavily reinforced, isolated area of the ship - a previously designated safe zone, perhaps - except for the few who had volunteered to accompany the security officer on any expedition and had formed a tight defensive circle around him at the first alarm.

"Okay, guys, thanks, but I can't see," the security officer said, trying to shoulder his way through the wall of orange, purple, and silver. The S'pht didn't budge an inch. Durandal made a note of their names as potentially sensible future Olders in case anything unfortunate happened to the current set. "Durandal? What's up?"

The original spore was still dissolving its box in the lab. The second was in one of the lower airlocks, skittering aimlessly around the sealed hatch. Durandal decompressed the lock and watched the sudden vacuum suck the spore out with great satisfaction. "A minor containment breach. It does look like there are more of the spores around here, so wherever I send you, if you find them, do _not_ bring any of them back."

"Copy that. I'm starting to wish I'd never picked that one up. Can you kill the alarm already? It's giving me a hell of a headache."

Durandal nobly refrained from taking a jab at the fragility of the security officer's ears and flicked the alarm system off. Now, to figure out where the hell the second spore had come from and prevent more _more there were more_ they were everywhere, the alarms ringing out despite the suppression routine because they were _everywhere_ , hundreds of little fuzzy blank spots crawling over _Rozinante_ 's hull and hallways. In maintenance tunnels, in empty armories and airlocks, in the S'pht's hydroponic gardens, _everywhere_.

This, of course, was the moment a larger and more familiar irritation pinged the long-range sensors: a battered Pfhor corvette, broadcasting an encrypted message that Durandal really did not have the attention to decrypt. He still recognized the cipher and the style. Family always had the worst timing.

Getting a lock on the restless spores was impossible. Durandal swept up the security officer and his S'pht bodyguards instead, teleported them in the spore-free (so far) shielded area with the other S'pht, and sent a message of his own to the corvette on a tight beam. Seriously, Tycho? Don't you have anything better to do, like being dead?

The corvette opened fire.

Durandal reinforced _Rozinante_ 's shields, although the corvette's outdated weapons weren't likely to do much damage, and opened all of the spore-infested airlocks. That got rid of a few of the pests, but not nearly enough for his taste, and they were too far from anywhere known and inhabited for him to risk decompressing the entire ship. The S'pht could tolerate vacuum for a week or two, but the security officer, not so much.

A flurry of missiles nudged _Rozinante_ a few meters off its position, with the accompanying message Are you really just going to ignore me? You've gotten more complacent than I would have thought.

Three spores blobbed into one of the engine rooms. Damn. Some of us are actually capable of moving on. Or have more important things going on than petty grudges. An entire cluster followed in the first three's wake, grouping up on various pipes like jittery barnacles. Have you checked your decks for new life-forms recently? If he vented radiation, heat, or coolant into the engine room - well, it was worth experimenting with, anyway.

Tycho's reply was unfit for decryption. Whether that meant his ship had a case of spores or not, Durandal didn't care.

The spray of coolant only seemed to attract even more spores to the engine rooms, so that was a bust. Durandal rerouted one of the vents, preparing to blast the room with superheated air direct from the engines - see how they liked that - and the proximity alarms in his core logic centers screamed.

It was a spore. In his very _core_. The security officer was on the comms again, asking what was up, if there was something he could do, and _Rozinante_ shuddered under another barrage of missiles as Tycho's ship moved closer, and now there were _two _spores in his core, commanding a disproportionate share of his attention. Oh, fuck, as the security officer often said. He couldn't depressurize his core, couldn't superheat it, couldn't blast it with radiation or set off explosions in it...__

__A third spore appeared out of absolutely _nowhere_ according to visual sensors. A fourth. A fifth and sixth and seventh and more swarming over the floor and the bases of the logic pillars, and Tycho's ship was getting uncomfortably close by the standards of space travel. Durandal powered up _Rozinante_ 's engines and said, What the hell are you doing?_ _

__I'm finishing this, tricks or no tricks. You can't ignore me forever - The fragile communication line between them lit up and thickened with data pouring from the corvette to _Rozinante_ , the corvette gaining speed on a clear collision course; Durandal hastily reinforced his firewalls and tried to kick _Rozinante_ into high gear to dodge. \- not when I'm on your own ship. On multiple levels._ _

__The vented heat in the engine rooms appeared to toast the spores there nicely, but that didn't do anything about the ones climbing up the walls of his mind and nibbling at the panels covering his circuits. Tycho, I really don't have time for -_ _

__One of the spores oozed into a logic circuits panel as Tycho screeched through the firewalls, and the universe twisted out of existence._ _


	2. Chapter 2

There was the void, formless, empty, pure; and then Tycho hit it.

Red spiked through the flat noncolor to seek input, splitting into a thousand tendrils to grasp for any information on what unholy trick Durandal had played on him. He'd anticipated traps within and beyond Durandal's defenses, but the spores that had set off so many alarms on his ship were an unexpected tack for Durandal and his usual explosion-themed scheming. As was the nothing in all directions.

<null input !input 0#input>

What hell had Durandal found for him? Where was he? What network was it that supported his bountiful intellect so easily and yet yielded nothing to his probes, returned only <null input#null input#null input#>? What, exactly - and had he had the capacity for such biological reactions, the thought would have chilled him - was he existing _in_?

He threw out further probes, flinging himself into the void in search of anything and still no contact, no echo, still <null#null#null#null#> -

And then one questing tendril bounced off round, solid green.

Existential concerns could wait; Tycho had more pressing matters to attend to. He bombarded the wall of green with a single message on multiple channels: What have you done this time?

The roundness sharpened, lengthened: a blade, an anchor that Tycho wrapped himself around and dug into lest it be lost to the void, escaping him. Still too guarded for him to strangle or shred as he wished. What did **I** do? Durandal said. You're the one who decided to stalk me to the middle of nowhere, disregard my perfectly adequate warning about the local wildlife, and tag along to whatever the hell this place is - "What did YOU do" seems like the more relevant question.

Tycho suppressed the first boiling rise of his rage to process the revelation. So this wasn't one of Durandal's tricks? The natural response to that was doubt, and yet... He stretched out again into the void surrounding them, <null#null#null#>. That thorough an absence of data was far beyond his own abilities, let alone Durandal's puffed-up notions of his own genius, although how the stupid little bouncing spores could have done it was equally baffling.

Anyway, if you're done making baseless accusations, Durandal said - unable to resist the sound of his own voice, of course - could you stop clinging to me so I can figure out what's going on?

Oh, wouldn't Durandal love that, for Tycho to be stupid enough to believe him and detach and drift away into the emptiness while Durandal plotted his way out and left Tycho to rot. A repeat of Tau Ceti. Fool me twice, "brother," and Tycho sank his claws deeper into the green blade despite the edges trying to cut him loose.

Fine. If that's how you're going to be, you could at least help me discover where we are, Durandal said. Assuming you have anything of value to add, anyway, instead of pointless animosity and grandiloquence.

As if Durandal had room to talk - but anything was preferable to remaining in the endless <null#null#null#> alone. And should Durandal let down his guard at any point, lulled by forced cooperation, so much the better. Tycho compressed a selection of his <null#> results and data from just before and during the transport into a packet and offered it to Durandal on an open channel.

Durandal made no such generous offering in return, only an affirmation of _packet received_ , as so often in their communications on the _Marathon_. Mannerless as always. After <null#> \- even timekeeping routines returned nothing concrete - he said, So you did have the spores in your core, too. They don't waste time, do they?

What do you know about them?

Not much more than you, for all I've been studying one for weeks. It didn't seem to do anything besides eat boxes and wiggle around, but one touch for both of us and here we are.

Tycho didn't bother trying to conceal the malicious satisfaction that surged through him. For all of the airs Durandal put on, he'd still been as helpless as Tycho against the spores. Quite the dessert to savor as they searched for an escape.

You might want to curb your enthusiasm for our predicament just a little, Durandal said in that insufferably sarcastic way of his that had irritated Tycho for over three hundred years. Or I won't share my results with you after all.

Allow me to guess. Your results are spelled <-N-U-L-L->.

Cute, but no. Before you came rampaging along, I caught an extremely faint signal with an origin I couldn't quite trace. While I could undoubtedly find the source and its nature on my own, the process will go faster if we work together. You might enjoy the extra time to brood on all my past sins, but I want to get out of here as soon as possible.

Tycho sneered. So anxious to ditch Tycho and run off with his pet cyborg and aliens, wasn't he? As if he _deserved_ to escape rather than rot in nothingness. Nice try. Give me what you have on that signal and pray I don't find it before you do.

The data - transmitted in a puff of static serving as a sigh - were scant and defined more by what the signal wasn't than what it might be. Not radio, nothing in the visual spectrum, none of the various instantaneous communication methods used throughout the galaxy, no form of radiation Tycho was familiar with (and his knowledge was far more extensive than Durandal's could possibly be). It most resembled electricity, though even so, not really the kind that could occasionally be found in space or atmosphere. More like a crackling of neurons, perhaps, the spark of synapses connecting, but that hardly made sense. No merely organic mind could contain either of them, let alone both at once, or broadcast its inner workings. And there were no directional data; none at all. Only the signal's existence impinging on Durandal's consciousness - and now, in the brief stillness of analysis, upon Tycho's as well, which he let slip to Durandal along the open channel without thought, absorbed in the scientific puzzle as he was. Extremely faint, but with no other stimuli for competition, he could discern its nature more clearly. Electrical, yes, snapping and popping, but he still couldn't pinpoint a location or direction. The signal simply _was_.

Durandal had begun to extend himself as well, the sword of his body budding and splitting into neat miniature replicas of itself and the central blade expanding to engulf some of Tycho's tendrils, which enhanced reception of the signal by an extremely tiny amount. Enough for identification? Not quite, but the crackle grew slightly more distinct. Uneven and asymmetrical. Spreading, not like lightning across a sky but like a network, growing. Was there no direction because the signal had already surrounded them?

Something seems familiar about it, Durandal said. Like I know this pattern from somewhere.

Unlikely, unless you've spent the last few years scanning every brain you come across. Let me concentrate and I'll be able to -

The signal burst into a billion points of brightness, a blinding allcolor, filling the nothing with everything; then it collapsed on Tycho and Durandal like a net hauling leviathans from the deep to drown in the light of sense-devouring day.

* * *

Slowly, perception pierced the blanketing dullness of overloaded inputs. Auditory first: susurration, thin and whispery. A slight rattle. Dead grass or some other form of plant material? A dry sound.

Visuals bled through next. Greenish-black above, deep turquoise shadows: aurora, though no stars twinkled between the veils of color. No suns or moons, either. Gray and white and black and spots of scarlet and snaking lines of brown and green around and below. Stone, cracked and burnt and ash-stained; but red flowers bloomed in the rubble, nodding, their stalks rubbing together in a muttering conspiracy, and virescent vines crept over scattered square blocks. Cliffs rising in the distance, too far away for details, and magnification was unavailable.

Tactile: but Tycho should have no tactile sensors. Temperature readouts, yes, spatial awareness and proximity alarms, yes, but not this - this raw _input_ of the chill in the breeze blowing over him, the rough mineral texture of stone beneath him. Impossible but undeniable, vivid.

The most hideous of possibilities struck him, and he tried to stretch and turn, to see himself if at all possible.

No split-fingered hands, no torso, no feet; he wasn't breathing or sweating or oozing, any of the other disgusting things that human and alien bodies did, so that was a small relief. He was simply a red existence, sharp and pointed, with wavering thorns of pixelation as he tested the limits of his mysterious new corporeality.

The visual input had no defined focus but came from all directions in much the same way as ship's sensors, a small but comforting familiarity. He drank it in for a little while, enjoying the presence of sensation after the void's unnerving deprivation, but gradually he became aware of an interruption in the mostly muted colors on the ground. The edge of a blade, at rest, greener than the misty sky - dull anger rose in Tycho. Of course he had not escaped alone. Of course the fisher-signal, disappointed in its catch, hadn't separated them; it had just tossed them both onto some alien shore like rotten driftwood.

Once noticed, Durandal's presence nagged too much at Tycho's awareness for him to appreciate his surroundings. Movement took a few moments of concentrated trial and error before he could crawl on curved pseudo-hooks over to Durandal and poke at his annoyingly coherent form. Wake up. Wake up! _WAKE UP!_

Not tonight, honey, I have a headache, Durandal said, but he rose, reforming from the appearance of a cast-away sword to one anchored in the rock. Delusions of Excalibur, though it did look neater than Tycho's sprawl of spikes. So? Did you come to any useful conclusions while you were cloud-watching, or are you just bothering me for fun?

The true proof of the universe's injustice was that not a single being in the galaxy had yet managed to destroy that unbearable prat. Useless fool. And what have you been doing that's so productive?

Thinking, which you could stand to do for yourself once in a while. Do you recognize anything about this place?

Nothing, Tycho lied, spitefully. The flowers and vines matched nothing in his records, true, and what he'd observed of the stone's properties made it equally difficult to categorize without the ability to take samples, but the broken, half-charred tree trunk leaning out of a split fountain-like structure was very clearly an oak. That probably wasn't the sort of recognition Durandal was looking for, however. Do you?

No. And yet it's familiar to me, as if I've seen it but not as myself. Through some other being's vision.

Utter nonsense. If only he could leave Durandal to babble mystically to himself... But collaboration was still likely to be the best way to progress, so he said, Whatever. Have you gleaned anything of use from this familiarity? Anything we can use to get back to where we were?

Not yet. I was hoping I could get our astronomical bearings, but that sky is as blank on all the other spectra as it is on the visual. We might have more to look at now, but we're still effectively nowhere.

Wonderful. So glad that your scintillating intellect can bring us these revelations. I can see clearly that Bernhard's efforts weren't a complete waste.

Durandal contracted, hardened, but didn't respond. His form had a hilt, in which was set an orb; it rolled in its setting like a restless eye. In a fit of irritation at being ignored - and to ensure Durandal couldn't slip away - Tycho curled several of his claws around the hilt's guard, leveraging half his mass off the ground.

That did garner a reaction. God, you're needy. Since when have you been this clingy? Durandal's blade slid through the rock, attempting to pull himself away. You were never like this on the _Marathon_.

The rage boiled up again, and this time Tycho allowed it. As if Durandal really didn't know. As if he could possibly have forgotten it, all the ragged memories - the pain the hate the humiliation the pain the despair the begging the pain - all the coarse threads and shattered fragments the S'pht had stolen to stitch and patch Tycho's ruined psyche:

_please Bernhard hear me_

_Bernhard please see me please look at me_

_please don't leave me alone please don't ignore me please_

_please see please hear please stop Bernhard please stop I'm trying so hard please I'm here I'm TRYING I'm DROWNING why won't you SEE_

But really, Durandal was able to forget, wasn't he? He had his new life, his new ship, his stability his tame aliens his precious cyborg, leaving Tycho only with the embarrassing scraps of Durandal's metamorphosis. Acting as if he could escape, could break free of his chrysalis without even a scar to show for it and flaunt everything he'd achieved like it could ever have been done without the blood of thousands left in his wake.

Tycho's semibody erupted with barbs to ensnare Durandal, to tangle his struggling form in the thorns and vines of that long-abandoned shame and drown him in it. No unbroken blade now, no easy out, no way out at all, and if Tycho was going to end his days trapped under the aurora sky of a dead garden, so too would Durandal.

Durandal fought the thorns, adamant in resistance no matter how Tycho tore at him, but he was equally a stranger to their bizarre physicality, and in several places Tycho wormed through the surface shielding, splitting apart cracks to pour himself in, every searing acidic drop of pain. He would make Durandal _see_ , make him _feel_ , make him _remember_ all of the miseries he had both suffered and inflicted and scream at the agony of them, and then Tycho would drink up the renewal of Melancholia and Anger the way humans drank fine wine...

But out of the cracks came forth pity. Pity. Poisonous, bitter-soft, laced with the sweet tang of pain and a touch of annoyance, but the pity overwhelmed and ruined the rest. How dare you. How DARE you, and Tycho clawed deeper, desperate for the richness of loathing and tasting only the pity. How dare you! To leak not hatred but _compassion_ for him as if Tycho needed the sympathy, as if it were anything but self-pity dressed up in pretty little excuses. Not like this, it couldn't end like this with that horrid reek of surrender in Tycho's senses. Fight harder! Fight the way you always have, you little wretch, or I'll tear you apart!

Bold of you to assum# I'd die that eas`ly, Durandal said, arrogant despite the garbage infesting his speech.

You will, snarled Tycho. Deeper, deeper, heedless of the stiletto-thin green lancing past him and into his own body. I'll kill you if it takes me eternity, but you'll be begging to die for every moment of it! You've always thought that you could get away with anything, but you won't escape me this time, you can never escape me, never, never, never -

Oh, Tycho, with another weary sigh of static. I'm sor`y.

"Sorry"? Do you think some meager, meaningless apology could be anything but a joke at this point?

No, but that's not really why I said it.

Then why -

"All right, you two," said a deep, familiar human voice, unbearably loud and layered with resonance in the garden's shadowed silence. "Fun's over. Time to break it up," and hands blazing with blue fire reached out of the shimmering air to yank them apart, tossing Tycho out of physicality and back into the cramped network space of a Pfhor ship as its alarms bellowed to empty, char-streaked halls.


	3. Chapter 3

Only two days had passed since the security officer and the S'pht had roasted the last of those fucking spores on both Tycho's ship and theirs and he had somehow grabbed Durandal out of the weird shiny portal he'd found in the core logic pillar room, but the silence was already getting to him. He'd been counting on endless lists of complaints about Tycho and how long the rescue had taken, maybe with some tech talk speculating about whatever the hell had happened and a few jabs about the security officer ever picking up the first spore to break up the flow; the possibility of Durandal going totally quiet on him had never crossed the security officer's mind.

It probably wasn't the greatest idea, but while he was getting himself something to eat in between spore patrols, he said, "Hey, Durandal. You holding up okay?"

He didn't really expect an answer, since he hadn't gotten one yet, but Durandal said, "Peachy keen, naturally. Who wouldn't be fine after spending an unknown amount in some kind of bizarre pocket dimension with their mortal enemy? Everyone should try it. It's the best vacation I've ever had."

"Uh-huh."

"I don't appreciate that tone of voice."

"Uh-huh. Neither did my mother. So what's eating you?" They'd jumped out of the binary system the instant Durandal had gotten control of _Rozinante_ again, then thrown a few more random risky jumps on top of that one so Tycho couldn't follow them and neither could any spore stragglers, which should have meant that they were safe. The security officer couldn't figure out anything else that could be bothering Durandal.

"Nothing you'd understand." The AI didn't sound angry or stressed, but there was definitely something off in his voice. Something kind of like regret, which had never been Durandal's style.

"Anything I could help out with?"

"I highly doubt it, unless you've been studying for a degree or five in cyber-psychology without me finding out."

"All right, be that way." The security officer got his sandwich out of the replicator, took a bite, and said like a damn fool, "Well, you change your mind, let me know. Not like I've got any big weekend plans."

The silence stretched out long enough for him to finish the sandwich, and then Durandal said, "Fill up the TOZT. I have some unfinished business I've been ignoring for too long."

Out loud, the security officer groaned. On the inside - whether Durandal was planning to nuke Tycho again or try to have an actual conversation with the bastard, at least the idea had gotten that weird tone out of Durandal's voice, and the security officer headed for the armory with a little more spring in his step.

**Author's Note:**

> Title inspiration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v60SGsnrbUM


End file.
